Tour Of Duty: The Complete First Season

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All Rise...

Judge Neil Dorsett likes to begin stories with "I was in 'Nam," but the closest he's ever been was a bowl of nuoc leo.

The Charge

Whatcha watchin' son? Don't give a damn. Next stop: Viet Nam.

The Case

At the tail end of the 1980s, the Vietnam film fad was on the second half of
its pendulum swing. With Rambo relegated to a syndicated cartoon series (though
his ill-fated final hurrah was yet to come) and people starting to get sick of
talking about Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, not to mention the
defunct and loathsome camoflage fashion fetish (no revivals, please), Hollywood
got the hint and began to abandon Vietnam as a focus for billing. So what does
that mean? Time for a TV series! Thus CBS began its Tour of Duty.

Tour follows the career of the generically named Bravo company from
the beginning of Lieutenant Myron Goldman's command of the unit. Goldman
(Stephen Caffrey, Longtime Companion) is a fresh West Point graduate, but
the team bears a battle-scarred sergeant, Zeke Anderson (Terence Knox) and
several experienced PFCs. The existing team is joined by other newcomers,
machinegunner Alberto Ruiz (Ramón Franco), and conscientious objector Roger
Horn (Joshua Maurer), who is assigned to radio duty. Yes, the radio officer is
named Horn. Ha, ha. But they never once punch the joke, so don't worry about it.
The team experiences internal struggle as well as fighting the enemy and other
menaces from without, such as racists, relegators, romances, and relatives.
Sound familiar? Hey, it's an episodic war show, it's meant to fill a niche,
whattayagonnado. The key difference here is the setting—indeed, the
familiar structure serves only to throw the setting into sharper relief.
Tour runs through several stories that viewers of the movies mentioned
above would find very, very familiar—but since it's a full season of
hour-long television, the show has little choice but to present something new
now and again. And the quality, on relative terms, is fairly high.

Like many episodic television shows, this one gets off to a deceptively
cheesy start. The pilot episode is crude in its characterizations, particularly
the whole seasoned sergeant with young lieutenant thing, and it's only a regular
hour-long show, so things are a bit rushed at the very start. Over the course of
the season, however, Goldman and the soldiers under his command gain a weathered
maturity to become the characters this show is actually meant to be about. The
clean faces and shaves the men (including Zeke and the seasoned guys)
incongruously wear at the head of the show are slowly replaced by grime and
stubble. For CBS in 1987 and a non-soap opera format, this is pretty progressive
stuff; presumably the show's full season contract allowed for such slow
development. By midway through the season, the blues-playing peacenik RTO has
donned a manly 'Nam do-rag, indicating the Bravo Company's evolution into a
crack fighting team is complete. Most of the characters have feature stories of
their own, such as "The Battling Baker Boys," focusing on Eric
Bruskotter, and an episode guest-starring Ving Rhames that revolves around a
racial conflict and spotlights Stan Foster. As far as Terence Knox's Sergeant
Zeke, he acts as the rock; his development as a soldier is complete before the
series begins. Knox, though, as well as the others, develops greater
believability as the series progresses. Knox is an interesting actor. He moves
his head a lot and has sort of a theatrical approach, but at the same time it's
really casual, like it's just what he does anyway. He sort of combines Ed Harris
and Stephen Furst (with whom he shares the reasonably distinguished St.
Elsewhere screen credit).

On the whole I would have to say that the producers, cast, and crew of
Tour of Duty did a pretty good job at what they were doing. Each
character is well-drawn, reaching just beyond the necessary requirements of
formula and into real character—although in some cases this takes a good
while to emerge. The question in each episode of Tour is: when will the
violence come, and what will be the consequences? Whether internal or external,
Bravo company will encounter violence and war in a given episode, and one
or more of them will be forced to make critical decisions. Sometimes this is an
easy one—"The Battling Baker Boys" must come to terms or die;
sometimes it's harder, as when Zeke takes on an infant war orphan; and
sometimes, as this war would increasingly teach the characters, the situation is
just plain impossible. Worse than that, sometimes the impossible situation is
pointless, as with the celebrated final episode of this season, "The
Hill," in which Bravo is forced to repeatedly conquer the same ground, only
to give it right back up in some kind of holding pattern. This is the situation
which finally proves to be too much for Private Horn; while over time he's
reconciled himself to making war, he cannot abide the foolishness of throwing
life away for what seems to be pointless ritual. Of course, team spirit wins the
day as is the rule in all such shows. And how about the action? Well, a lot of
it consists of soldiers firing away into bush at things they can't even vaguely
see. Which is to say, it's pretty realistic. The series's combat scenes are at
their best in night fights, where the show's limited budget is put to excellent
use, making what must have been fairly small environments seem quite large. The
producers use the confusion and poor visibility to make the most of their extras
and effective if not elaborate sets. The show also provides the requisite amount
of explosions. What would action entertainment be without explosions?

One factor I came to appreciate about Tour is its eschewal of the
preliminary teaser segments traditional to action TV. Instead each show,
following the credits, opens with a title card of a relevant factoid about the
war that leads us into the episode. Pretty nice, and it enhances the gravity of
the presentation. We're used to that kind of thing now, but it was fairly
uncommon for TV at the time.

Notable guest stars in the first season include Tim Thomerson
(Trancers), William Sadler (Demon Knight, The Shawshank Redemption), the
aformentioned Ving Rhames (Pulp
Fiction, Rosewood), Mark Rolston (Aliens, Shawshank), Tia
Carrere (Wayne's World), Everett
McGill (Twin Peaks, Quest for Fire) as a renegade Montaignard, and
Pamela Gidley (Fire Walk With Me), as well as pretty much the roster of
Asian-American actors working regularly on television at the time.

On the technical side, Tour of Duty's preparation for DVD is
something of a conundrum. First of all, the show hasn't visibly been remastered,
so this is the same soft and low-contrast video that was originally broadcast.
This softness seems in part to be intentional in order to replicate the grainy
news and other stock footage which is occasionally spliced in. However, much of
this softness also seems to be an artifact of the old video transfer used. It
may have actually been necessary to use this; the show dates from 1987, which
was toward the beginning of the heyday of network television shows which were
shot on film but edited on video. On the other hand, Sony's TV department has
moved a step closer to righteousness on this release. They have taken the
trouble to remove the 3:2 pulldown necessary to display film on television and
done their best to present a progressive transfer. For the most part these
efforts are successful. Motion, even during difficult vertical pans across the
copious vegetation necessary for any show about Vietnam, remains quite smooth
and appealing for a five-show-per-disc package, and the also copious still shot
dialogue scenes fare very well indeed in this department. The softness of the
image may actually be helping out on this front, allowing the compressor to
function more evenly. The only failure in this case is the cuts, which in many
cases have retained an interlaced frame between the two progressive frames that
should really play alone. This isn't really a problem, though; set-top owners
won't notice it at all, and even those who use a software player will only
notice this, if they do, as an instantaneous change of resolution—and back
as quickly. I only mention it because the steps taken to improve this video
transfer indicate that Sony is working on these issues to make a better product
with longer shelf-life. The only unfortunate factor here is that the source
elements for Tour of Duty are not that strong. Basically what this means
is a sort of soft image and poor contrast. Dropping your brightness down a notch
or two for this show will make a big difference. The effort needed to remaster
the series thoroughly from original film elements is probably not
cost-effective, though. This is about as good as Tour can be expected to
look under those conditions, barring the interlacing detail mentioned earlier in
this paragraph. It looks significantly better than a cable rerun once the
brightness adjustment is made.

As far as audio goes, don't expect too much. Tour is monaural, and
the DVD utilizes the existing soundtrack without any detectable remastering for
dynamic range, so we're listening to something here which was created to play in
living rooms before the popularity of home theater in its present form. There
are practical considerations in such a mix that preclude the extremes of volume
that would benefit a war show; it would perhaps have been nice for Sony to
provide a bit of extra oomph in the low end, but the mix does its job
adequately, presenting clean voices and gunfire. And authenticity is always
good. I will note here that Tour of Duty's use of the Rolling Stones'
"Paint It Black" as its opening theme—which I seem to remember
from original broadcasts—has been omitted, so those expecting to rock out
at the beginning of each episode may be disappointed. Other licensed rock tracks
have also been removed and replaced with library music, which tends to be sort
of anachronistically '80s-oriented toward the beginning of the season, a
keyboard sound perhaps meant to be reminiscent of Apocalypse Now. This is regrettable,
and the show seems to get a clue about it as time passes, taking on a more
generally bluesy quality to its scores. More likely, the show moves into a more
confident use its own original soundtrack material and away from the licensed
tracks.

As with so many of their television boxes, Sony has seen fit to provide each
and every disc of Tour of Duty: The Complete First Season with an
auto-playing menu for the PC that pops up links to the website and a crappy
on-disc software player. This is only marginally less annoying than PC-Friendly,
and I really wish we could see the end of this practice fairly soon. That stuff
is never really even useful the first time through, and only becomes more and
more tiresome the more you see it.

In all, Tour of Duty deserves a qualified recommendation: if you know
what you're getting in a CBS television series from 1987, and can be interested
in war material that's produced on that level, go for it; it plays a mean game
on those terms. The music replacement is unfortunate, but non-fatal. If you are
apt to be turned off by the conventions of that era of television either in
general or as regards to war programming specifically, stay away.